As I mentioned in my previous post on Fas, I met a group of top scholars and researchers on my first night in Fas, who gave me two of their best students (and teachers) to teach me. These teachers had acquired degrees in the Ta’leem al-Ateeq (or the Ancient Teaching system of study in the Qarawiyyin Mosque and other mosques and institutes all over Morocco). They had actually lived for about 8 years each in the ancient Saffarin Madrasa that I had visited, and saw the very simple life of its students, who live in very small rooms, shared with one or two more people, and receive less than 50 or 60 dollars to live on, each month. It was exam season in the time that I went, and I got to see my teachers grading exams of young students in this ancient system, and I once went to meet one of my teachers in the Qarawiyyin Mosque, and found that its doors were closed to the public while students took their exams inside! One of my teachers was absolutely brilliant, and he acquired Bachelors and Masters degrees in both the Ancient Teaching system and the modern public university system simultaneously. He also got his PhD in the Ancient System and is now working on his PhD thesis in university, in Law. Fas gets really hot in summer, and a lot of its inhabitants, who originally come from other cities or villages, leave to their cities of origin in summer to escape the heat. This teacher was from Essaouira (home of the famous Gnaoua Festival), and he would go there every summer and memorize the entire books that he would be studying the following semester! He still knows Ibn al-Subki’s Jam’ al-Jawami’ in Usul al-Fiqh by heart, ma shaa’ Allah, la quwwata illa billah!

On my last (full) day in Fas, these teachers took me to meet shaykh Muhammad al-Taaweel, who they said is THE alim of Morocco today, recognized by all as a mujtahid in the madhhab, and is according to their estimation the most knowledgeable scholar in the entire Muslim world. So we went to his house to visit him, and he told me that these teachers of mine come from a unique generation. This is because, as he explained, the system of Ta’leem Ateeq had previously been gutted and weakened, but he didn’t explain when this happened, maybe it was during the French colonization period. Then it was restored to how it used to be, and my teachers were products of this generation, but now new programs have been introduced to completely weaken it again. He said instead of 10 hours of fiqh a week, they have now been reduced to almost one hour a week for certain levels, and complained that you can’t create a faqih from studying it one hour a week. He said what “they” want these days is to create people that carry the label of “Islamist” but have no brains or proper education, so that they provide no intellectual match for other parties, etc. May Allah protect Islam and put baraka in its ever-decreasing number of proper scholars. The shaykh gave me three of his small books to take with me to Jordan.

And so one teacher was assigned to teach me Ibn Abi Zayd’s Risala in Maliki Fiqh. I had taken with me the commentary of Shaykh Zarruq but he preferred we read that of Abul Hassan al-Maliki because it is what they teach at the Qarawiyyin. We read the first quarter of the book with commentary then decided that at this pace we wouldn’t finish in time, so for the rest of the book we only read commentary where we thought it necessary or important.

The other teacher was to teach me the Usul, and he brought showed me some books that we could study. There was no time to study Ibn al-Subki’s Jam’ al-Jawami’ with commentary, so I picked another book, mostly because I liked its cover! It was the Luma’ of al-Shirazi and turned out to be a perfect choice. It’s a book from the 5th century A.H., the century in which the science of Usul al-Fiqh was fully worked out, and in which some of the most important books on the subject were written. The book is short and explains all the important concepts, giving all views on the subject and then arguing for his view. My teacher pointed out to me whenever his view was different than what became the dominant view later on, and gave me the terms that were later put down for concepts that al-Shirazi discussed that still had no name.

We finished just in time, with a couple days to spare, in which we finished a tiny book called Isal al-Salek fi Usul al-Imam Malik, which is quite recent in authorship and simply lists and briefly discusses the Usul that are accepted in the Maliki Madhhab.

Usul al-Fiqh is possibly the most important science in religion, because it teaches you how to understand the Quran and Sunna, and how to derive laws: this it is the source and basis for fiqh.

Finally if you’re wondering why I picked the Maliki madhhab if I come from a country that is either Hanafi or Shafii, it is because the Maliki Madhhab is unique in one of its usul, and that is the Amal of the People of Medina. What I read about it in Yasin Dutton’s The Origins of Islamic Law convinced me that the practice of the people of Medina in the earliest generations is the best gauge of the Prophetic Sunna. Aisha Bewley has an article about it here: ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/aBewley/Page1.html but I definitely recommend you read the chapter on it in Dutton’s book.

The second reason is that my shaykh is a Maliki, and the more that a murid becomes like his shaykh, the closer will their souls be to each other, and the more that his soul will take from the soul of his shaykh. Thus I hope this will bring me closer to my shaykh, rahimahullah wa radiya ‘anh. This is most important reason for my choice.

I also read on my own the first half of Ibn Taymiyya’s fatwa on the Maliki Madhhab, in which he discusses its superiority to the other Madhhabs. While known as a Hanbali jurist, Ibn Taymiyya later became a mujtahid mutlaq, not restricting himself to any madhhab and ruling according to what he sees is correct. It has been published as a small book called The Favoring of the Madhhab of Imam Malik and the People of Medina, and Aisha Bewley translated it and published it as The Madinan Way: The Soundness of the Basic Premises of the School of the People of Madina. I read the first half because it discusses the soundness of the usul of the madhhab, while the other half gives examples from particular fiqhi questions by comparing the maliki ruling to the other madhaahib.

Now I’m reading Shaykh Muhammad Abu Zahra’s Malik, which also studies the Maliki usul.

Finally, I plan to read, inshaAllah, a book recommended to me by my teacher, called Usul al-Fiqh by Al-Arabi al-Loh. He said that it basically summarizes what is in all the different commentaries on Ibn al-Subki’s Jam’ al-Jawami and that reading it is like reading all these commentaries. He said that if I read it and understood it, the entire science of the Usul al-Fiqh will be in my grasp, and made me promise him to read it at least twice.